


it hasn't felt like home before you

by sinagtala (strikinglight)



Category: Persona 4, Persona Series
Genre: College, Established Relationship, Fluff and Crack, Living Together, M/M, Stream of Consciousness, souji and yosuke driving each other crazy with their radically divergent domestic habits basically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-14 02:52:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5727004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/sinagtala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For what it’s worth, Souji always does the groceries at Junes, even when they’re fighting. This means more to Yosuke than he’ll ever let on, but he’d also like to think he doesn’t need to say it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it hasn't felt like home before you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goukyorin (sashimisusie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sashimisusie/gifts).



> Prompt fill for [“Hey, have you seen the..? Oh.”](http://striking-light.tumblr.com/post/136928022015/send-me-a-number-and-ill-write-you-a-one-shot)
> 
> This functions as a kind of cracked-up coda to ["how will you hear me when I open my mouth?"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4756274), though there's really no need to have read that thing to make sense of this thing.
> 
> For Susie, as ever, because the two of us make a lean, mean, Souyo-headcanoning machine.

It doesn’t take long for Yosuke to discover that living with Souji involves fighting entirely different kinds of battles than the ones they’re already used to.

Yosuke knows for a fact that this is insider knowledge. He’s certain that not one soul among Souji’s plethora of friends and admirers—a dime a dozen between Inaba and Tokyo, make no mistake—could possibly imagine sharing an apartment with him as anything other than a dream, rose-gold morning sunlight through gauzy curtains and perfectly prepared plates of omurice on the dining table and all. It’s a glamor Souji seems to cast over everyone he so much as breathes on, seemingly without knowing it. Or so he says.

Even his closest friends— _their_ closest friends—can only understand so much, though Yosuke senses that the sympathy is real. The problem is that it’s undercut too often by an amusement that he knows is only made possible by distance. Frankly, he’s lost count of all the times he’s gotten a “Well, that’s Souji-kun for you” from Chie over the phone, or an “Isn’t Senpai the cutest???” text from Rise, to which his response has always invariably been, “You only think that because you don’t _live_ with him!”

Yosuke isn’t sure if he should be resentful of the “privileges” attendant upon being Souji’s roommate/best friend/boyfriend ( _holy god_ , he thinks). After living in the same tiny backwater town as him for one extremely eventful year (to say the least), seeing him on and off and missing him desperately in the interim for one more, he should probably be more enchanted by the proximity than he finds he actually is, some days.

He should be on Cloud Nine, dammit.

For the record, it isn’t just the cats. Souji’s sometimes excessive fondness for cats is the very tip of the iceberg as far as his many “quirks” are concerned—readily apparent to anyone in relatively close acquaintance, seemingly harmless, kind of endearing. Cute, even. Yosuke’s the only one who ever sees it as anything more insidious, especially when he notices more than one pair of eyes staring out at them from the alley next to their building as they walk home from their evening classes. Sometimes there are only two, sometimes four, sometimes as many as seven, clustered together there in the narrow half-dark, waiting for leftovers.

It gives Yosuke the creeps, but of course all Souji ever does is glance over his shoulder into the alley and murmur, the faintest note of worry in his voice, “I should put something out later.” And for all the times that Yosuke’s asked him plaintively what those cats will do to him if one day they assess his offerings and find them wanting, the ever-gentle “Don’t be silly, Yosuke.”

Privately Yosuke tells himself that fearing for Souji’s life isn’t silly at all, but there’s no arguing with him on that score. Most days he’s content to just let the matter drop—Souji’s the authority on slicing up Shadows, after all, and given that he can probably be trusted to handle a few potentially rabid stray cats.

There’s also the matter of Souji’s intense, borderline anal-retentive obsession with cleanliness, something Yosuke only vaguely remembers noticing back in Inaba, though in retrospect the immaculate state of Souji’s school notebooks and the sparkling floors of his uncle’s house should have clued him in. In such close quarters Yosuke finds himself hyper-aware of even the smallest movements Souji makes to keep everything _just so_ —the way he’ll nudge discreetly at Yosuke’s shoes so they sit neatly to one side in the entranceway, and the way he turns all the dishes so they’re facing the same way on the drying rack.

For all that Yosuke supposes it’s cool that their apartment stays comfortable and clean and free of dust bunnies and other potentially dangerous life-forms, he also wonders if it’s going to be symptomatic of their life together that he feels like he’s walking on eggshells all the time. If he has to worry constantly about which way the toilet paper should go for fear of upsetting Souji, he imagines he could very well go insane, especially considering that they’ve already argued about exactly that on a couple of occasions.

(He always insists that it doesn’t make a difference either way—it’s going on your ass eventually anyway, so what does it matter—but each time Souji argues back for the greater efficiency of having the toilet paper go over the roll with a passion that Yosuke’s never seen him show about, well, anything. With the possible exception perhaps of the investigation of two years ago. And dancing, sometimes. And, on occasion, Yosuke himself, though Yosuke makes it a point not to think about Souji’s passion-showing abilities when they’re fighting, for fear of losing his resolve.)

“How is any of this a problem?” Chie asks him pointedly, one night that he calls with the intention of all but screaming his despair at her over the phone. “I mean, you’re a slob, aren’t you? So Souji-kun just cancels that out.”

“I am _not_ a slob,” Yosuke retorts, affronted. “I just let little things go, like normal people.”

“Yeah, well.” She scoffs softly on the other end of the line, and Yosuke feels his hope for the future fly out the window and disappear over the horizon. “Good luck getting Souji-kun to let anything go.”

And it’s true. Souji doesn’t let the toilet paper thing go. He doesn’t let the sock that Yosuke leaves on the floor next to the laundry hamper go either—not the first time, or the five other times the sock stays on the floor because Yosuke figures any space within a foot-long radius of the hamper may as well still count as inside-the-hamper. Each time he just sighs and pulls off his glasses—he needs glasses to see at distances now, and Yosuke’s convinced his eyesight’s going bad primarily from squinting at flat surfaces to check for dust—and rubs the bridge of his nose with an “I’m tired, Yosuke,” or an “I’m just a little upset, Yosuke” and it’s all Yosuke can do to keep from shaking him by the shoulders and asking him in a distinctly-not-indoor-voice what his deal is.

The sixth time the sock thing happens Yosuke comes home to a line of duct tape on the floor of their room, marking a boundary between their two futons. Souji’s sprawled on his stomach on his with his nose—glasses sitting primly on it and all—in a Physics textbook, and he does _not_ look up when he hears the door creak. Yosuke’s a thousand percent sure the lack of eye contact is deliberate.

“You can’t cross that line,” he says to the book, in what Yosuke feels is an unnecessarily snippy tone of voice. “You and your mess can stay on your side.”

Later that night Yosuke takes one of his socks and throws it across the border in defiance. He wakes up the next morning with said sock taped to his forehead and Souji already gone to catch an 8 AM class, and the conspicuous absence of his usual bento ready and waiting on the kitchen counter, even if Souji’s always taken it upon himself to make lunch for both of them.

Because he thinks himself too proud to beg, Yosuke merely huffs, tears the sock from his forehead—swallowing a shrill yelp as the tape comes free from his skin—and tells himself he’d been craving a heaping bowl of instant ramen anyway.

But still, far and away the most infuriating thing about living with Souji is that, on the flipside of every strange quirk and tic and habit, after every squabble and spat and argument, he’ll never run out of ways to get under Yosuke’s skin. In the aftermath of the Sock War it’s Yosuke’s phone lighting up in the middle of Accounting, Souji’s name flashing across the screen, and he can’t help it—all of his attention snaps toward it, bewitched, magnetic, like there’s some kind of black magic that leaks out through Souji’s fingers and into his phone when he types.

He doesn’t even care that it’s not an apology. It’s not even an excuse. It’s an _I’m out and on my way to Junes for dinner, what do you want?_ and Yosuke’s heart leaps so much at the sight of those words he can only pray his professor doesn’t put him through the wringer for randomly looking down at his lap and smiling.

At this point he knows it’s a losing battle. He’ll try to stay mad—and to resist the siren song of food—for five minutes. Maybe ten, if he feels extra strong. But before the bell rings and class lets out he knows he’ll have texted Souji a _Hamburg steak pretty please,_ dignity be damned.

For what it’s worth, Souji always does the groceries at Junes, even when they’re fighting. This means more to Yosuke than he’ll ever let on, but he’d also like to think he doesn’t need to say it.

The most infuriating thing is that Yosuke knows how this story ends, because it always ends the same way. In a half hour or so the bell will ring, and he’ll find himself in such a hurry to get home—it freaks him out sometimes, how readily he thinks of their little flat as _home,_ when they haven’t even lived here six months—that he won’t even remember to put his walking music on. It’ll be a brisk walk—but not a run, gotta play it cool—that ends with him kicking his shoes off in the entranceway like always, but maybe today he’ll kick them off slightly to the side this time, for Souji.

Yosuke knows this for a certainty: what he’ll find is Souji setting the table for the two of them, his hair mussed up and sweat-streaked from cooking, and as soon as he hears the door creak he’ll raise his head and look up. He’ll have a funny look on his face; it’s the same look every time, though Yosuke still can’t quite pin down what it’s supposed to mean. Not just happy, even if he does light up a little—softly, as though someone’s struck a match and set it to a candle somewhere inside. Yosuke can’t help thinking that he also looks a little startled—the eyes widening a little bit before the recognition sets in, the head tilted and inquiring. Like he’s been waiting all his life for someone to come home to. But also like he can't quite believe he's finally looking at that someone—like he's a little kid with every single thing on his Christmas list piled in a sparkling, beribboned heap at his feet. In those moments Yosuke feels like the biggest damn surprise in the world.

Yosuke also knows when he sees that look he’ll cross the room, dropping his bag on the sofa as he goes, to wrap his arms around Souji’s waist and bury his nose in the crook of his neck. He'll be warm, and will probably smell a little bit like sweat and like cooking smoke, but Yosuke won’t care. Somehow he knows it won’t matter to Souji that the hug creeps up on him while he’s still got spoons and forks in his hands—Yosuke’s sure that in no time those arms will wind around him as tight as they can go, cutlery and all, and squeeze, and neither of them will be able to breathe for a few seconds, and that’ll be fine.

(If he’s _really_ lucky, he might even find Souji wearing one of his shirts, a habit that took him by surprise when he wandered into the bathroom one morning to find Souji brushing his teeth in the pink striped shirt Yosuke remembers being so fond of summer of their third year. He still thinks it’s some weird telepathy they might have going on even if they don’t know it, because he had been halfway through asking if Souji’d seen that exact shirt, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and yawning, “Hey, partner, have you seen my—” Then he caught a glimpse of the familiar shape of the boat neck stretched quite unfamiliarly across Souji’s clavicles, and all he could say after that was, “Oh.”

“Sorry,” Souji had said around his toothbrush. Yosuke remembers thinking at the time that there was a little gleam in his eye, a spark that looked just a bit evil, but might also have just been the bathroom light. “You left it on the floor by my bed the other night, and it looked soft, so…”

Yosuke’s mouth had opened and closed ineffectually at that in a manner reminiscent of a particularly dopey goldfish—two, three times with no sound coming out but a single “Gah,” for all that he would have wanted to respond with something infinitely more eloquent.

“I can take it off now if you want it back,” Souji said, and if he hadn’t been bending down toward the sink to rinse his mouth out Yosuke would have sworn—would still swear, remembering it—that he’d been grinning.)

“Hanamura-kun?” The voice that ruptures Yosuke’s daydream isn’t Souji’s, and the disparity between what he’s been imagining and what he hears is so stark it almost aches. “Perhaps you’d like to define the three components of the Accounting Equation?”

The most grueling battle of all, Yosuke knows, is the one he’ll be fighting over the next thirty minutes.


End file.
